


Ace of Hearts

by theleaveswant



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Card Games, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Loneliness, M/M, One of My Favorites, Poker, bored in a barn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 12:46:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/theleaveswant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony watches Steve play solitaire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ace of Hearts

Steve Rogers plays solitaire.

With actual cards, is the important part, not on a computer; Steve Rogers plays solitaire with actual cards, or at least he does today. Tony's not sure where he got the deck, whether he found it somewhere in this dank barn they're using as a hideout or brought it with him in one of the pouches on his belt. They look old, anyway.

Today . . . kinda sucks. It sucked this morning when they were drawing Hydra agents away from civilian targets and it sucks now that the battle's over and they're stuck waiting for news or another target while simultaneously waiting out the rain. Bruce is over by the space heater, wrapped up and squirming in an itchy wool blanket Natasha found in the barn, turning the pages of the coverless romance novel she found tucked underneath it. The Widow herself is up in the rafters, conserving heat energy by snuggling up against Hawkeye in a way that leaves their arms free to operate weapons should the need arise. Thor appears to be deep in quiet conversation with a pair of enormous white-muzzled draft horses and Tony's getting bored of trying to figure out the functions of the barn's sundry assortment of tack and tools while he waits for JARVIS to come back to him with more information, a signal to move on or go home, and Rogers has pulled a stool up to the wobbly wooden table and started up a private game of cards.

Tony's not sure how long ago he started, how many times he's already laid out the cards in neat little stacks and shuffled them around, layering black on top of red, fours on fives on sixes on sevens, then ferrying them up to the foundations, fours on threes on twos on aces all sorted out by suit, before Tony began watching him. He seems, apart from occasional glances at the rain-streaked window, thoroughly focused on his game. That's one bet Tony knows better than to take, though; Rogers is not at all the thick reactionary grunt he'd imagined, is in fact more of an intellectual than he tends to get credit for, even from himself. Tony knows he's thinking, running who knows how many mental cycles while his hands gather up the cards, shuffle them, and spread them out again, smooth and automatic, he just can't read what.

He's not even cheating, as far as Tony can tell—a detail he'd probably never have thought worth mentioning before he actually met the guy, but damn if Rogers isn't just full of surprises—which is funny because the ease of sneaking pieces around without having to circumvent any prohibiting code has always seemed to Tony the chief, if not only, advantage of playing games by hand. At first Tony thinks he must be pretty bad at it, because he never seems to get all the cards stacked up on the foundations, but that doesn't make any sense. Rogers is stubborn, absolutely, but not obstinate enough keep playing when every hand's a losing one, not if there's nothing at stake. If there was something wrong with the deck, some glitch that made the game unplayable, he'd have located it by now and found a way around it. It's not until Tony looks closer, starts actually tracking the cards as well as Rogers' reactions to them, that he discovers that he is winning, not every game but a respectable ratio. He doesn't bother to play all the cards into suit-stacks because there's no point, when they don't auto-sort or reward you with explosions or by cascading down the screen and you're just going to shuffle them all up again anyway. Instead Rogers plays to the point where he can tell, sometimes earlier than Tony can, that the game is either won (twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth) or lost (narrowing eyes, deepening that persistent vertical crease between his eyebrows), and sets up the next iteration.

Tony wonders where he learned to play, who taught him if he didn't pick up the rules for himself by watching a computer like Tony did, and if he calls the game solitaire, Klondike, or patience. He drifts off into his own head, picturing Steve Rogers the boy from Brooklyn playing cards alone or with other kids, on his apartment floor or on the breadlines; the star-spangled man with a plan gambling for sequins with the showgirls on tour; and Captain Rogers the American hero laughing with friends and learning to bluff in bar rooms across Europe, and is just coming back to the present enough to notice that Rogers' hands, which he's still staring at, have stopped counting out the cards and are instead just shuffling and sorting them by suit, over and over, when Rogers raises his voice.

"Something on your mind, Stark?"

Tony blinks and looks up at Rogers, who's watching him out of the corner of his slightly sparkling eye. "Trying to think of a game we can all play together. Unfortunately most the games I know require alarming volumes of alcohol and/or competitive nudity but there's no booze here and it's too cold for Strip anything to be fun, even if we were to ignore Bruce's obvious disadvantage."

"Go Fish?" Natasha asks from directly overhead, and when did she and Barton move?

"What are we, schoolchildren?" Tony rolls his eyes. 

"We could play the game of poker," Thor says, appearing with unnerving stealth at the edge of the table and placing two large mason jars full of differently sized nails on the surface between Rogers and Tony, "and use these as tokens for wagering."

"You play poker?" Barton asks as he shimmies down one of the vertical supports and Natasha swings down next to him. 

Thor nods. "Darcy taught me. She deemed it essential to the success of my participation in Midgardian culture."

"That was a fun night." Natasha grins. "We should do that again sometime."

Tony frowns at the implication that Natasha is holding poker nights with Thor and his friends behind Tony's back, then blinks. "Oh, hey, Pepper's not here. That means I might actually stand a chance at winning."

"She's good?" Bruce asks as he shuffles over, tucking his blanket tighter around himself as he moves and holding a finger between the pages of the book to mark his place. 

"Deadly," Natasha confirms. "She won an island at a game in Palermo last year."

"Yeah, that was a good weekend." Tony fetches chairs for himself and Bruce while Barton hauls over straw bales for himself, Natasha, and Thor, who's busy counting out six even piles of assorted metal bits. He settles down across from Rogers, strips off his his gauntlets and gathers up his rusty stake, then nods across the table while the others make themselves similarly comfortable. "Call it, Ace."

Rogers smirks and rolls up his sleeves, then taps the deck on the table and begins to deal.


End file.
